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Storage Server | Shared Storage Solutions
Nathaniel CooperJun 14, 2022 1:29:00 PM8 min read

How Storage Servers Help Grow Your Video Production Business

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Do you know the number of consumers watching video content reached 244+ million in the United States in 2022 and 54% of them love to watch the videos from the brand or service they support? The number is hitting the new record every year— and that is where the video production industry needs to tackle the growth! With the demand for 4K or 8K resolution, the industry is heading towards the large file sizes that are difficult to edit and store.

Whether you're in film making, video editing, or graphics designing, post-production is the most important part of the process. You need to edit, render, and finalize the video— even more than once before the final look. Thus, it is impossible to manage multiple files and share them with your remote team while relying on the hard drive, USB, or Google Drive.

The raw and edited video files and the video editing software will need a lot of computing power to run without any lags and limitations. What's the solution to all these problems when your windows storage is not enough? A storage server but nothing else! A dedicated storage server will help you manage the raw and edited video files, organize the projects, share the final version with the clients, etc.

Are you wondering what storage problems you can face in your business, especially in the video production or filmmaking industry, and how on-premises dedicated storage servers can help you grow the business flawlessly? Let's get started:

Storage Problems in Video Production

Whether it's filmmaking, short documentaries, or advertisements-making, the video production industry will require you to have immense storage. Compared to documents, or images, the videos will take up more space as every frame, visual, timestamp, or metadata will consume some space. Moreover, after the post-production, the finalized version of the video file will even cover more space due to effects, transitions, and other elements added to the video.

Thus, video editing demands more storage computer servers, and hard drives, USB flash drives, and cloud storage solutions such as OneDrive or Google Drive cannot handle such immense needs. Therefore, a dedicated storage service will help you cover your needs! The on-premises storage service will regular the remote team workflows, build brand consistency, and improve the customer experience. The faster data transfer speeds, larger storage capacity, and faster editing through the media servers or filer servers will improve the workflow and improve the working team's efficiency.

Performance Storage Solution— Dedicated On-Premises Storage Servers

The one top-tier solution for the storage problems that come your way in the video production industry is the on-premises dedicated storage servers. These servers can be of many types, such as NAS, SAN, or DAS. These storage solutions can either be connected to servers or workstations to improve the remote workflows. Here are some of the storage solutions:

1.    Direct Attached Storage (DAS)

These directly attached storage discs— as clear from the name— can be connected locally to the servers and workstations. These DAS discs have grown and progressed through various technologies such as SATA, PATA, SCSI, SAS, etc.

Here is an overview of these storage server solutions:

Storage Technology

Speed/Features

What's unique?

PATA

Parallel ATA, 150 MB/s

PATA discs can utilize connectors to join two drives per cable

SATA

Serial ATA, 6 Gb/s

These drives have faster read/write speeds and thin cables than PATA

Ultra320

SCSI, 320 MB/s

Small Computer System Interface drives are standards for traditional servers

SAS

Serial Attached SCSI, 3GB/s to 8GB/s

SAS has replaced the SCSI in modern storage servers

 

2.    Storage Area Network (SAN)

Storage Area Network (SAN) can offer data storage solutions that works best for remote teams, especially when you have different departments or teams such as the editing team, proofing team, and delivery team; SAN can take up multiple networks in one drive in storage area network. This performing storage can be divided further to be utilized on different storage servers. The SAN has two types, as mentioned below:

  • iSCSI SAN
  • Fiber Channel (FC)

 

iSCSI

The iSCSI storage networking can provide up to 1GB/s to 10 GB/s and utilize the SCSI commands. This is the first protocol that uses the end-to-end SCSI commands over the IP, and these protocols can be utilized with any storage server.

Fiber Channel

The Fibre Channel (FC) can manage to provide a speed of up to 20 GB/s and utilizes dedicated hardware such as a Host Bus Adaptor (HBA) which an ordinary hard disk drive cannot provide. Also, the cables utilized for connecting the server components are the special fiber channel cables.

3.    Network Attached Storage NAS

If you want a single shared storage node, the server NAS has got you covered! The network storage server will have multiple disk options appearing as a single node in the RAID array. The NAS storage cannot be seen as the disk drive in a PC but as a network location. The NAS storage protocols include the CIFS, NFS, GFS, and AFS, allowing the users to have access to multiple files simultaneously in a single location. Thus, this NAS server storage system can be a good addition to your storage server setup for remote teams.

 

How will Dedicated Storage Servers Improve the Workflow?

Dedicated storage servers will provide more storage and better transfer speeds and tackle post-production tasks without any lags. The on-premises dedicated storage servers/ enterprise storage servers can also serve as backup storage or optimized storage in the video production industry. Wondering how the storage server solution will boost your business? Here're a few benefits of using the storage solutions or multiple storage types:

Quality is the Key!

The video production industry is growing at a rapid pace, and with that comes great responsibility and quality demands! The consumers demand the 4K or 8K resolution videos with mind-blowing transitions and effects, making the post-production a memory-intensive task and the amount of data to store will be immense.

Utilizing the dedicated storage servers will help you improve the post-production tasks and communication with the team! You must be wondering what communication has to do with the dedicated server and storage? Imagine the time you spent uploading the raw videos on Google Drive, and then the editor will get back to you with editing. You might have to add the comments in the file and email it to the editor again with the updated file for further editing. The shared storage or a dedicated on-premises storage server will have all the projects organized, and every team will add the comments or tags in that particular folder. All the progress will remain for lifetime with server solutions rather than being buried in emails— for future use!

Storage Needs are Immense!

The storage needs, especially in filmmaking or any other niche in the video production industry, are immense! You'll have to process the raw files, edited files, and finalized project files and might have to save them for the future (to be used as portfolio or client needs). Thus, every video will consume the size in GBs and ingest the hard drive or private cloud storage in no time— while private servers or virtualized private servers for storage is the solution!

Thus, the best method to store the media assets is the dedicated on-premises storage servers. Another advantage of using the shared storage servers is that all your team members will be on the same server and there is no need to make multiple copies of files for each team member.

Collaboration and workflow need to be Smooth!

All your team members will have to communicate with each other regarding work on the project smoothly. Thus, the post-production tasks can be best done when communicated effectively as multiple people will be working on a single project to bring the one finalized file in the end. The dedicated storage server will have all the team members on board where they can effectively collaborate and work seamlessly on the project to have a productive outcome in a shorter span.

 

Recommended On-Premises Dedicated Storage Server Solution

Suppose you're running a video production or filmmaking business and tired of low storage every other day. In that case, you'll have to discard the old means of storage options such as storage devices i.e., external hard drives, USB flash drives, and cloud storage solutions such as Google Drive, and other types of flash storage options.

We recommend the dedicated on-premises storage server solution by ProMAX to accelerate the workflows and edit smoothly. ProMAX understands the flaws and where a video production team lacks exactly, i.e., dealing with numerous files, processing the raw files, and rendering them multiple times to achieve a productive outcome. Thus, ProMAX— unlike the RAID systems and external hard drives— will let you scale the work to another level via cloud server/ cloud solutions or on-premises server solutions!

The platform is designed to provide you with integrated backup storage or more of an archive where all your media assets and the video files that need to be shared only with the post-production team and client will be saved and secured. Moreover, ProMAX has also integrated the data encryption features alongside the storage servers. ProMAX has different options in drive bays (multiple form factors): 16-bay and 24-bay storage servers to choose from, which can provide the maximum performance (speed up to 5500 MB/s with SSD) and sustained video performance (4000 MB/s, 57 streams of ProRes 4K @ 560 MB/s).

Under the hood of 16-bay, you’ll get the 2nd Gen Intel Xeon (dual core), and 24 core 32gb RAM in DIMM Slots and graphics card in peripheral support. Want to setup the quadcore CPU with hardware encryption diskless technology using the server Intel, ProMax has you covered in this as well. ProMAX is the name of scalability and network security, not the limitation— and that's where the platform offers Thunderbolt 3.0 USB C and SAS+ option to utilize the 3rd party storage. Try this infrastructure-ready technology from ProMAX to boost your business!

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Nathaniel Cooper

As Chief Operating Officer of ProMAX Systems, Nathaniel Cooper, runs ProMAX Systems day to day operations. Cooper has been working with Storage, Backup and Media Management for video and creative professionals since 2001. Cooper has lead the design and deployment of some of the largest media systems in the world including a range of customers from NFL, MLB & NBA teams, US Military operations, and many of the worlds largest PR agencies and consumer brands. Cooper has spent the last 9 years as part of the ProMAX team and specializes in translating complex technical issues and options into easily understandable concepts.

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